June 23, 2018

Trump’s Envy of Kim Jong-un

I’ve just watched footage of Donald Trump saluting a North Korean general, and it occurs to me that what’s really going on here is that the president is envious of Kim Jong-un, who has the absolute authority
to execute his uncle with antiaircraft machine guns, consign tens of
thousands of people to the gulag, and rule through a personality cult
based on ruthless indoctrination.

This,
the last hangover of Stalinist totalitarianism, must be the society for
which Trump yearns as, remote control in hand, he wanders the corridors
of the White House searching for Melania or a late-night burger. It’s
one in which prostration to the leader is the norm, critical thought is
punishable with death, and the whole tedious apparatus of American
constitutional democracy — checks and balances, the rule of law, a free
press, an independent judiciary — has been relegated to history’s trash
heap.

The real enemy,
you see, is not the North Korean general Trump saluted, or Kim himself,
the erstwhile “rocket man” turned “great personality” and “very smart
guy.” No, it’s the forces within American society working to limit
Trump’s power and so keep the Republic. As he tweeted upon his return
from the summit with Kim in Singapore, “Our country’s biggest enemy is
the Fake News so easily promulgated by fools.

”

Biggest
enemy! A monstrous regime, still armed with nukes, gets a pass because
Trump dreams of building condos on its deserted beaches and seeing a
Trump Boulevard in Pyongyang, but no pass for CNN or The New York Times
if they refuse to kowtow. A Russian attempt to subvert the last election
also goes ignored.

By
contrast, America’s democratic allies are a bunch of losers. Canada’s
prime minister, Justin Trudeau, is “dishonest and weak.” Germany refuses
to pay up and is “bad, very bad.” Trump even seems to have lost
patience with his one European buddy, President Emmanuel Macron of
France. The trouble with these wimpy leaders is they don’t starve their
citizens or execute troublemakers with antiaircraft guns.

Asked
by Greta Van Susteren, in an interview with Voice of America, what he
would like to say to North Korean citizens, Trump said: “Well, I think
you have somebody who has a great feeling for them. He wants to do right
by them, and we got along really well. We had a great chemistry — you
understand how I feel about chemistry.

”

We
understand. Chemistry supplants facts and is an excuse for laziness.
Trump has no interest in reality. When allies, the leaders of democratic
nations, try to speak to him about reality, his eyes glaze over.

Dictators
can make up their own worlds. They can make words mean the opposite of
what they were intended to mean. They can turn “fake news” into
propaganda that’s impossible to contest.

This
is what makes Trump so envious. He wants a country where everyone
succumbs to his make-believe, a nation where everyone, without
exception, would pound the sidewalk in inconsolable grief if he had the
extraordinary temerity to die.

The
United States now has a president who would have told East Germans in
1961, as the Berlin Wall went up, that the Soviet and East German
leaders were to be congratulated for walling them in because they were
concerned about their people’s safety, happiness and well-being.

Trump, in Singapore, saluted evil.
That’s a pretty ignominious way to bring down the curtain on more than
seven decades of American stewardship of the world after the defeat of
evil in 1945.

Of
course, history is not our esteemed leader’s strong point. Trump also
tweeted that the nuclear threat from North Korea is over — abracadabra,
just like that! He urged Americans, in this light, to “sleep well
tonight!” This recalled nothing so much as the British prime minister,
Neville Chamberlain, on his return from Munich in 1938, declaring “peace
for our time” and saying, “Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”

A
year after Chamberlain’s “ultimate deal” with Hitler, the Nazi leader
invaded Poland, igniting World War II. North Korea, whose recent history
does not encourage trust, still has its nuclear arsenal. In Singapore,
it committed only to “work toward” denuclearization.

That
could mean anything. But Trump insists, “We’re going to denuke North
Korea” — less than a year after he threatened to nuke it!

This
was an unserious summit, cobbled together in haste by an unserious man,
and summed up by the video fantasy of a glorious shared future, shown
by the Trump administration in Singapore just after the meeting. This
was billed as a “Destiny Pictures Production,” but it was in fact
produced by the National Security Council, as the council later
sheepishly admitted.